Improve the key signature selector in the new score wizard

• Jul 22, 2013 - 18:14
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project

When you start a new score and select the clef it's very hard to know which is selected


Comments

Do you mean in the Intruments dialog, where the clef is only named and not actually shown?
If so: I don't see this as a Problem, a) each Instrument has ist 'natural' clef, b) you can't chenge them there anyway and c) it can get changed later from the Palette and there they are clearly visible.
If not, what else do you mean?

Possibly something entirely different, as per my dictionary clef is clave in spanish

Title Improve the clef selector Improve the key sig selector

OK, guess I found that armadure is key signature.

And I see what you mean: the active selected key sig is which the Background a very light gray, very hard to tell appart indeed.

A black thin line around it might help as would a slighlty darker gray Background?

Status (old) active won't fix

FWIW, it's also not keyboard-accessible - the selector shows as a single widget, thus you can cannot use arrow or tab keys to select. You'll probably start hear me bringing this up a lot...

I didn't mean to imply it was. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I just fixed a typo in my previous response, maybe that somehow led to the confusion?

I brought it up merely to suggest that maybe rather than fix the contrast problem using the current single widget, we consider replacing it with separate widgets for each key signature, which may solve both problems at once.

Ok gentlemen, that's already a long thread :) But not much proposals for a better UI.

We can

  1. Fix the highlight color to make it more obvious which key is selected
  2. Change the UI drastically. We could use a custom combo box or a custom list widget and display the key signatures in it. I guess the name C major / A minor could be display in each row together with a staff, a treble clef (it's missing currently, and the key sig.

Any other suggestion?

Accessibility is a completely different topic, and it's fine to raise it but it's probably not very productive to raise it for any UI related issue.

Indeed, and I don't plan to raise it in situations where I don't think it productive.

Oh, and I now see that I somehow inadvertently changed the status to "won't fix" and that's why Jojo-Schmitz asked :-). Sorry about that.

Anyhow, obviously, changing the contrast here is the easy fix. But as far as concrete suggestions, I guess envision something list the custom list widget. Except I'd have described it differently. It's really a set of fancy radio buttons, where instead of a text label and a little circle that gets filled in, the images of the key signatures themselves become the buttons. They'd highlighting to indicate selected state just as they do now, except with more contrast :-). Although really, ordinary radio buttons but with pictures instead of / in addition to text labels would be fine.